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Dir3kt's Trophies

Dir3kt's Archive

Here is woot happened during a week on the AppStore a.k.a the Wild Wild World.

And here is what happened during that epic day of eternal glory:

After one week on the AppStore I sold 13 units of ZoOp! which should amount to 20$ dollars on my bank account. LD October Challenge is a TOTAL SUCCESS!!! However my balance is still negative considering the Apple Developer subscription fees and the 70$ I paid to build a shadeless tent for filming the trailer (which was a lot of fun BTW). So this, and considering the efforts I put to make this game makes it a TOTAL FAILURE!!!

Little story: I got contacted by a US TV to feature my game. I was so happy thinking ‘hey, some guys in this world believe in my game!!’. I was so wrong. Turned out they asked me to pay between 2-3k for producing the segment. In short they wanted me to pay them to produce their crappy show which would only make prejudice to my game, at best.

I feel down. So down, and stupid as well.

What I learned doing this October Challenge: World is filled of bad people trying to make money on you. Exact opposite of the LD community which is full of handsome people helping each other. At least we have a safe heaven, thanks all of you

Although the game was almost ready at the beginning of the month, it was still lot of work to make it available on the AppStore. Overall it has been a great learning experience, a bit painful though. I mean we all like to write code and/or do arts. But what about marketing?

So what now? Basically I’m sending mails and creating threads like an headless chicken. Trying to make as much noise as I can. I feel like a small ant in a huge colony 😀

After failing last year, I’m back, full of hope, energy, will, motivation and mojo!

Speaking of the game it’s almost finished, I’m on the polish phase and hope to submit by this week-end. If there is one tip that I could give to anybody participating: Evil is in the details! Don’t underestimate the time needed to polish the game and create the marketing material (logo, screenshots, webpage, description, pitch, etc..).

My last activity has been to create a trailer which has just been released

Hopefully this doesn’t look too amateurish. It’s 100% homemade. I created a shadeless tent with a box, some fabric and 4 spotlights. I borrowed the camera and the music is from a friend’s band.

Actually I had lot of fun building the tent and inviting some friends to play the game inside it. We even had to stick the iPad to the box, and the box to the ground because it was moving too much

I’m glad to announce that, after lot of work, a post compo version of … is now available! It has more levels, more awesomeness and completely new graphics, look!

It will be released on Kongregate and Newgrounds in a few days. But before play the beta here while it’s still hot! Any feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome. Do not hesitate to drop me a tweety-tweet!

Of course my original entry can still be played here (100% shameless). By the way reading the comments I do believe that there are not a lot of folks that found the super secret level available only in the compo version. As a motivator, here is a sneak peak at it:

Testing those LD games takes so much time and energy, especially if you try to fully (or at least reasonably) explore each one. But I felt that I learn as much by playing them that I learn by creating them.

Anyway I said to myself that I would do a small selection after rating 50 games. Here are my top 5 picks in no particular order.

Nothing fancy, just a template HaxePunk project that do a bunch of things. Basically I wanted to make sure that everything works (display a sprite, load tilemap, play music, particle effects, basic UI, …). I also have some utilities for steering and A*.

Oh maybe this could be a small tip. Prior to LD makes sure everything works and test with assets generated by the tools you are going to use. There is nothing more frustrating that incompatibility issue during a Jam :/